The Place at Martinez

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this place an A+ for the area of inspections. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also gave this nursing home a grade of A for our long-term care score. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 94.22382 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. Our nursing score focuses on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We factor in both the levels of training of the nurses and the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a relatively low total compared with most other facilities. Lastly, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this facility performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is typically a reliable indicator that a facility has sufficient quality controls in place.

Switching gears to our fourth category, this nursing home really didn't fare well. Due to a bottom of the barrel grade of F in this category, this was clearly this facility's poorest category. In our short-term care category, we seek to create a meaningful gauge for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we analyze the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. In this nursing home's case, it looks like it provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the average facility. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 3.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.